(See front cover)
With all the stories in the world to choose from, which story would a shrewd cinema producer pick to coincide with the coronation of a King of England? This was one problem which last year faced Warner Brothers' Associate Executive in Charge of Production Hal Wallis. For a cinema producer, problems never come singly. Another and more difficult riddle for Producer Wallis was this: what were the best roles in which to cast two 12-year-old identical twins who looked so much alike that their mother could scarcely tell them apart? One test of a cinema producer is his ability to solve two problems at the same time. Ready for simultaneous release in 275 U. S. cities last week was Producer Wallis' exceedingly neat finesse of his dilemma: Billy & Bobby Mauch in Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, last made as a silent picture with Marguerite Clark playing both roles in 1915.
The Prince and the Pauper starts on the day in 1537 when boy infants are born simultaneously to Henry the VIII in Windsor Palace and to Pickpocket John Canty in Offal Court. Young Prince Edward thrives at the court, under the tutelage of the Duke of Norfolk (Henry Stephenson). Young Tom Canty thrives in the gutter, with Latin lessons from Father Andrew and whackings from his father (Barton MacLane). Prowling about London one day, Tom crawls under a bench outside the castle to take a nap. The Captain of the Guard hauls him out and is giving him a thrashing when Prince Edward comes out of the palace to call his dog. Prince invites pauper indoors to play. They change clothes for a joke, laugh when the mirror shows how much they look alike. Then the Prince runs out again to find his dog. The Captain of the Guard, thinking it is the pauper, resumes his interrupted thrashing, tosses Prince Edward out into the street.
In his story, Author Mark Twain set out to show that palaces were not much better than the people in them. At Windsor, young Tom Canty falls under the wing of the bad Earl of Hertford (Claude Rains) who, when he hears Tom's story about how he got into the palace, merely tells King Henry that the Prince is mad. When the old king dies. Hertford plans to execute the Duke of Norfolk and have Tom Canty crowned, with himself as Lord Protector. As things shape up, he seems in a fair way to accomplish it.
Another notion of Mark Twain's was that monarchies would do better if kings saw how their subjects lived. In medieval London's alleys, Edward fares not much better than his counterpart in the palace until he encounters a young soldier of fortune named Miles Hendon (Errol Flynn). Hendon feeds him, humors his apparently preposterous notion that he is the King of England, sets out, when the boy is kidnapped, to rescue him from John Canty's gang of thieves. When the rescue entails fighting off the palace guards, sent to kill the young King before he can return to foil the Hertford,plot, Hendon begins to think his young protege's ideas of his own grandeur may not be delusions after all, hurries him back to London.